Page 68 of Heat Clickbait
"The viewers can find entertainment that doesn't involve you becoming a meat crayon on live television," she snapped, grabbing my wrist and yanking me away from the edge with surprising strength. Her fingers were warm, soft, and I had to bite my tongue to keep from making some kind of embarrassing noise.
"That's... graphic. And weirdly specific. Have you been watching fail compilations again?"
"Get down. Now." Her voice carried that edge it got when she was genuinely pissed, not just performing anger for the camera.
I glanced at my phone, at the chat exploding with excitement over Callie's appearance, at the viewer count climbing toward 50K. "But the stream?—"
"Fuck the stream." She reached for the GoPro before I could protest, her fingers brushing my chest as she turned it off. "Chat, stream's over. Your disaster streamer needs an intervention."
The sudden silence felt like a slap. No red recording light, no chat messages, no audience to perform for. Just me and her and the Los Angeles skyline stretching out around us like the world's most expensive therapy session.
We stood there on the roof, the city sprawling below us in all its smoggy glory, and suddenly I couldn't stop moving. My fingers drummed against my thighs in complicated patterns, my weight shifted from foot to foot like I was preparing for some kind of dance-off with gravity itself. Energy crackled through me, but now it had nowhere to go. No camera to perform for, no stunts to attempt, no audience to distract from the mess inside my head.
"You're literally vibrating," she observed, not letting go of my wrist. Her thumb traced over my pulse point, probably feeling my heart trying to escape through my skin.
"Always am," I said, trying for my usual chaotic cheerfulness. The words tumbled out too fast, too bright, like verbal confetti. "You know me, human embodiment of an energy drink, basically a caffeinated disaster in human form, a walking ADHD stereotype with commitment issues and?—"
"Crash." The way she said my name, not Tanner, not my full government name when she was trying to be authoritative, justCrash, made me stop mid-ramble. "Why were you really going to jump?"
The truth sat heavy on my tongue, mixed with the metallic taste of anxiety and the lingering sweetness of the last piece of gum I'd demolished. It would be easier to lie, to make some joke about content creation and viewer engagement. But something in her brown eyes, the way she was looking at me like she could see straight through the performance to the mess underneath, made honesty feel possible.
"Needed to feel something else," I admitted.
"Something else besides what?"
I pulled away from her grip, needing space, needing movement. The roof suddenly felt too small, like the whole world was shrinking down to just this moment, this conversation. I started pacing in tight circles, my hands gesturing wildly as words tumbled out faster than I could organize them.
"You know that feeling when your skin's too tight? Like your bones are trying to escape through your pores? Like there's this itch under everything that you can't scratch no matter what you do?" I ran my hands through my hair until it stood up even more than usual. "It's like being allergic to your own existence but in the worst possible way."
She watched me pace, those brown eyes tracking my movement like I was some kind of interesting scientific specimen. "Yeah."
"That's how I've felt since the convention. Since you walked in smelling like—" I stopped abruptly, the words dying in my throat. Since you walked in smelling like pack, like home, like everything I wanted but couldn't have. "But it's worse now. So much worse."
"How worse?"
I laughed, high and slightly hysterical, the sound echoing off the surrounding buildings. "Watching you with them, seeingtheir marks, knowing you chose them and not me... I keep doing stupider and stupider stunts because at least when I'm falling, I'm not thinking about how much I need to bite you."
The admission hung between us like the confession it was, heavy and raw and probably the most honest thing I'd said to another human being in months.
"Then why haven't you?"
The question made me stop pacing, made my entire chaotic brain screech to a halt like a record scratch in a disaster movie. "What?"
She moved closer, slow and deliberate like approaching a spooked animal in one of those nature documentaries Ghost was always watching. "If you need to bite me that badly, why haven't you just asked?"
"Because I'll hurt you!" The words exploded out of me, accompanied by wild gesturing that nearly sent me stumbling backward. "Look at me!" I gestured at myself, at the barely contained chaos that was my entire existence. "I can't sit still for thirty seconds without feeling like my skin's going to crawl off my body. I can't be gentle because gentle requires stillness and stillness requires focus and focus requires?—"
"Too afraid," she finished quietly.
That stopped me cold. Made my mouth snap shut and my hands fall to my sides like she'd just solved some complicated equation I'd been struggling with for years. "What?"
She was close enough now that I could see the gold flecks in her brown eyes, could smell her scent more clearly beneath the layers of pack bonds. Close enough that when she spoke, her voice was soft but somehow carried more weight than when she'd been yelling.
"You're afraid that if you're still, if you stop moving for one second, you'll have to actually feel things instead of burning through them with stunts and streams and chaos."
"That's not—" But it was. Of course it was. She'd seen through the manic pixie dream boy act to the terror underneath, the bone-deep fear that if I ever stopped moving, stopped performing, stopped being useful and entertaining, everyone would realize there wasn't much left.
"Sit," she commanded, pointing at the rough roofing material.
